What Has Helped Make Sports Exciting? Watches.

Without the watch industry, sporting events would be a lot less exciting; winners would be difficult, if not impossible, to determine; and the awards ceremonies at the Olympics and other sports competitions might be very different.

But then determining who crossed the finish line first is one more example of how watches have affected our lives in more ways than just the ability to tell the time.

Thanks to the efforts of watchmakers over the centuries, precision has come a very long way. “The first recorded sports competitions from the 14th century, often between guilds, used hourglasses and in the 17th century, pendulum clocks, to measure performance,” Rémi Guillemin, the head of Europe and the Americas for Christie’s watch department, wrote in an email.

By the early 19th century, a better way was being developed in Paris, where horology certainly will play a large role in the Olympics and the Paralympics this summer.

“Paris was considered the Silicon Valley of the day, the most advanced center of the technology of the time, which was watches,” said Jean-Marie Schaller, the chief executive and creative director of the Swiss watch brand Louis Moinet.

Moinet, a watchmaker and astronomer of the period, “needed a timing device to record the transit of the planets,” Mr. Schaller said. So in 1816 he invented the chronograph, basically a stopwatch, that he named the Compteur de Tierces, or Counter of Thirds, which would indicate the hour, the minute, the second and the third of a second.

A few years later, according to Laurent Lecamp, the global managing director of Montblanc’s watch division, an iteration of the device began to be used in France to time horse races, a passion of royalty and commoner alike.

Nicolas Rieussec, a watchmaker for King Louis XVIII, “developed a technical object to calculate the time, which involved incorporating a small reservoir of ink into each timing device,” Mr. Lecamp said. Every time a horse crossed the finish line, a button on the pocket watch could be pressed to create a dot of ink on two discs, one for minutes and one for seconds.

Rieussec presented the inking device to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1821 and combined the Greek words chronos, or time, and graphein, or write, to create the name still used by watchmakers today: chronograph.

Chronographs quickly became a key tool at sports events. “The inaugural rowing contest between the esteemed universities of Oxford and Cambridge took place in the year 1829,” Grégory Gardinetti, a watch historian and watchmaking consultant, wrote in an email. (Oxford won.) “During this historic event, the precision of timing was such that measurements were taken to an accuracy within a quarter of a second.”

In the 1860s, Mr. Guillemin of Christie’s said, watch companies such as Heuer, Omega, Vacheron Constantin and Jaeger were debuting chronographs that could measure time to the fifth of a second. “This breakthrough was made possible by increased manufacturing precision and the introduction of more sophisticated parts,” he wrote.

“For several years,” Mr. Gardinetti added, “a fifth-of-a-second measurement was deemed the smallest interval that could reliably be recorded by a human operator using a stopwatch.”

Longines, now part of the Swatch Group, “was among the first watchmakers in the world to produce stopwatches to measure one-tenth of a second, in 1914, and one-hundredth, in 1916,” said Daniel Hug, the head of brand heritage at the Swiss maker.

But Longines wasn’t alone. “There is a stopwatch from Heuer that measured to one-hundreth of a second, also in 1916,” Nicholas Biebuyck, TAG Heuer’s heritage director, wrote in an email. He also noted that, over the years, the brand was the “first to do one-hundreth of a second, first to do one-thousandth, and first to do one-ten thousandth.”

By the 1940s, everything started to change. “The transition to electronics marked a revolution in sports timekeeping,” Mr. Guillemin of Christie’s wrote. “Electronic devices reduced human error and significantly increased measurement precision.”

One argument-ender already had been invented: the photo finish. As Carl E. Rosen, Bulova’s historian, explained, “The photo timer links the start of an event, marked by a pistol being shot, to starting a timing device, and it also starts a camera for a continuous feed, recording the image at the finish line so you could see who crossed first.”

But Alain Zobrist, the chief executive of Swiss Timing, a technology company that — like Omega — is owned by Swatch Group, said the first versions of photo-finish cameras were not a speedy fix. “There was film inside a big box,” he said, “and timekeepers had to go to a dark room to develop it, which could take up to two hours to understand the final results.”

And according to Mr. Gardinetti, manual timekeeping continued to be the gold standard: “Despite these technological strides, the International Amateur Athletics Federation maintained a preference for finish-line judgments based on human sight and did not officially accept these electronically timed results.

“Bulova created the photo timer in 1948, and it was used in the Olympic trials that year,” Mr. Rosen said. “But Omega was used in the Olympics itself.” (Omega has been the official timekeeper of the Olympics since 1932.)

But then came a competition difficult to call. “The shift from manual timing methods reached a pivotal moment during the 1960 Rome Olympics,” Mr. Gardinetti wrote. Judges using hand-held devices measured the exact same time for two different swimmers. Who should get the gold?

From then on, he wrote, “traditional hand-operated chronoscopes were replaced by more advanced photographic and electronic timing systems.” (The terms chronoscope and chronograph are interchangeable, he said.)

Over the years, the watch industry has used technological advances such as GPS, photo electrics and artificial intelligence to advance the speed and precision of sports timekeeping. “Omega deployed motion sensors in some sports,” Mr. Zobrist said, referring to recent Olympics. “We get access to the information from the athlete’s performance between start and finish. It’s constant, live information that explains where an athlete gained or lost time.”

Omega and Swiss Timing plan to bring one of those advances to the Games this summer, he said: “A new piece of technology at Paris 2024 is our Scan’O’Vision Ultimate photo finish camera. This new and improved version can now take 40,000 digital images per second on the finish line of races in athletics and cycling.”

It is another example of what the watch industry can do, he concluded, that’s “a lot more than just keeping time.”